REVIEW: SQUAREPUSHER - UFABULUM

Squarepusher - Ufabulum
Warp, 2012

I was quite excited by the prospect of the new Squarepusher album when the trailer clip for the album--a few seconds of "Dark Steering"--appeared online earlier in the year. There was something nicely punishing in it that, if it could hardly be called cutting edge, at least promised some gleefully disorienting listening. Throughout the highlights of his catalogue, Squarepusher's music has received a charge from the tension between Tom Jenkinson's virtuosic bass playing and his dizzying layers of programming. On Hard Normal Daddy and Music Is Rotted One Note, Jenkinson balanced sturdy melodicism and a surprising inclination toward jazz-fusion with strafing snares and deranged kicks, time stretching and stuttering the whole mess into oblivion at times. If that sounds like fun, it is. At his best, Jenkinson's music as Squarepusher is exhilarating. There hasn't really been a Squarepusher release that I would call exhilarating in quite some time, though. There were occasional flashes on Just a Souvenir from 2008, but Ultravisitor (2004) is probably his last top shelf release, and even that is patchy. For an artist who's been accused in the past of being willfully (some might say perversely) difficult and who maintains that his refusal to sit still as an artist comes from a desire to further his craft by avoiding repetition (see his recent Spin interview with Philip Sherburne), Ufabulum's guiding principle--the use of no live instruments and an emphasis on programming--hearkens back to 2001's Go Plastic, arguably his last "classic." Is this a case of Jenkinson reaffirming some core principles and getting the whole project back on track?

Partially, though not as much as I would like or expect. Ufabulum as a whole does not live up to the promise of its trailer and I doubt it will go down as the jewel of Jenkinson's oeuvre. It offers some brilliant moments, songs that are genuinely the most fun I've had while listening to Squarepusher in quite some time, but large sections leave me cold. At times, it feels just a fraction of something away from soundtracking your next latte at Starbucks, which is almost always a bad sign with music like this. In advance of the album, Jenkinson offered extensive notes on the nature of the project at Warp's website, and while his commentary can be fascinating--he describes his conceptualization of the album and its accompanying visuals as an attempt at "allowing visual aspects to feed back to the music that I make and vice versa, in order to bind them as closely together as I can," and it's entertaining to try and see how a song resembles "a tidal wave or polyphony smashing over [a] submarine edifice" or "a continually dissolving and reforming Greek ampitheatre" (sic)--the conceptual underpinnings don't seem to have made for a particularly cohesive listen. Talk of letting visuals guide the composition process and working entirely in "greyscale" are all well and good, but it doesn't get around the fact that there are two competing aesthetics at work on the album. If the tension between these aesthetics was somehow mined within pieces (or even across the album), then Ufabulum might have been a fascinating study in finding a hitherto un(der)explored middle ground between two extremes. Unfortunately, though, Ufabulum does nothing to reconcile its rampaging, distorted rave ups and its new age synth workouts, and an opportunity is missed.

After the rollicking opener "4001," one of the album's best tracks, Ufabulum drops into the buzzy, distorted melody line (possibly the worst moment on the album--it sounds like it was played on a telephone) of "Unreal Square." As much of a shame as it is to waste the album's best song title on a mediocre song, Jenkinson's "industrial sea-shanty" goes nowhere. After its irritating opening, the track briefly flowers into something quite fascinating, feeling like a continually aborting and re-starting house track with massive basslines smashing through everything, before returning to its shanty and some rather frantic (and pointless--the less charitable might even say masturbatory) drum explosions. It's like an early Prodigy track with none of the hooks and humour. From there, the album takes a detour into the kind of prog rock that begat many an RPG soundtrack and that serves usually as the punchline to a "[fill in the blank] on ice" gag. It's tempting to try and salvage this stretch--"Stadium Ice" has some lovely, lush synth tones, "Energy Wizard" plays with time in its middle in a clever way, and "Red In Blue" is nicely unearthly--but it's the effort one has to make to do so that ultimately sinks the middle of the album.

The second half is more promising, venturing into darker (and faster) territory and coming across like the Richard D. James Album's older brother who's having a bad night and plans to see what your organs look like under the streetlight. "The Metallurgist" reprises the trick at work in the good part of "Unreal Square," the middle section when it sounds like it's trying to go in two different directions at once, to great effect. Better still is "Drax 2," a drill n base workout that stretches out across seven minutes and at least as many discrete sections, slowing down for a gloriously foreboding percussion-less stretch before seizing up entirely in a symphony of glitches. "Dark Steering" follows suit, twisting "Drax 2's" approach into a darkly funky song that might be the album's catchiest track. The melody that starts up just under two minutes in is one of the few moments in which the album attempts to work the middle ground between its competing aesthetics (and a reminder of just how gifted Jenkinson is at writing a melody, when he feels like it). As it accelerates in its second half, sounding like a fleet of racing lightcycles, some of the glee of earlier Squarepusher returns.

The album winds down with a little less energy and excitement than the start of the second half would suggest. "303 Scopem Hard" doesn't offer much that the preceding three tracks haven't already covered (its metallic, streaking sounds feel like a repeat of those in "Dark Steering," in fact), but it's a fairly solid workout with some more time-stretching and stuttering at its close (it's almost enough to make one ask if Jenkinson knows of another way to end a track). The final song on the album, "Ecstatic Shock" opens with the most upfront drums on Ufabulum, but doesn't really get going until about a minute in. The arpeggiation and lush synths voicing the melody call back to the dullest stretches of the album, while its fairly busy drums keep it in line with the dominant aesthetic of the second half. It's not the most interesting track here--and like much of the album, it's the effort of having to find what actually is interesting about it, rather than that becoming apparent simply by listening, which sinks the track--but it's another solid (though unremarkable) exercise in various parts of the Squarepusher sound.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with the album is its sequencing and length. It might sound harsh, but I'm not convinced that there's enough strong material on Ufabulum to really justify a full album. There is, though, enough to make a taut, exciting EP or mini album. Keep "4001" in place as the starter, follow it with "The Metallurgist" though "Dark Steering," and close with "Ecstatic Shock" and Ufabulum offers twenty nine minutes of hard, intense electronic music. Of course, while this trimming would help put some more life into the album, it doesn't do much to dispel the nagging sensation of repetition, of having heard this all before. Clearly, Squarepusher is revisiting old territory here, even if he claims not to be. And while it's fruitful territory--the comparison I made to the Richard D. James Album is not for nothing: the album's best tracks really do remind me of that Aphex Twin classic as much as they remind of Squarepusher's own earlier work--I find it a little disappointing that Jenkinson hasn't returned from the wilderness of Solo Electric Bass 1 and Shobaleader One: d'Demonstrator with something a little more forward looking (for him, if for nothing/no one else). Perhaps the light and visual show that he promises in his live performances for this tour will help fight off the faint hint of dust that's present here (the videos on YouTube are impressive), and, given his legendary propensity for shifting directions at the drop of a hat, perhaps this is a necessary clearing out exercise, a revisiting of old pathways to find new ones. I hope so, because it's starting to feel like an awfully long time since Squarepusher shocked and, in shocking, delighted.